Having long been interested in Esperanto (since I discovered it in high
school over 50 years ago), even once taken a course to learn it (in 1981,
in San Francisco, the teacher was a native speaker*), I was naturally
intrigued that someone was apparently trying to translate Zen Mind into
that language.

*(How can there be a "native" speaker of an artificial
language? My teacher's parents had met through Esperanto, had no other
language in common, so that was the household language, and the first he
learned.)

Well, the little bit your correspondent did was a rather
poor translation. I am far from fluent, but can sort-of read the language
(it's pretty easy once you have some basics), and this is actually
surprisingly bad. I don't know what on-line translator he used, but I
tried Google's, and its product was actually pretty good, requiring only a
few tweaks to be pretty-much correct (see below).

First, though, there's a problem with text encoding. There
are no letters 'ĝ' and 'ŭ' in Esperanto; these appear on your Web page
(instead of the correct Esperanto accented letters) because it's encoded
in the archaic character set (charset) ISO-8859-1, sometimes known as
ASCII, which can handle only the most basic accented letters for Western
European languages -
more.

It's unfortunate that LL Zamenhof, the creator of
Esperanto, chose to use accented letters to represent sounds (such as the
sound we spell 'ch') not available in the standard 26 letters of the Latin
alphabet, and even more unfortunate that he chose to use accents in ways
they are not used in any other language (such as the circumflex  over
consonants; as a result first conventional typewriters and printers, and
then computer systems, have had difficulty working with the language.

The original ASCII character set used in computers, based
on the standard typewriter keyboard, didn't include Esperanto's accented
letters, so a couple of workarounds were invented. One was to add the
letter 'x' after a letter that would usually have an accent, e.g. 'cx' for
c^. Another (actually proposed by Zamenhof himself in the early days) was
to add 'h' in the same way: 'gh' for 'g^'; this becomes a little confusing
in some cases, e.g. 'gh' appears in Italian but is pronounced differently
than 'gh (g^) in Esperanto, and awkward (visually anyway) in the case of
'h^', which would be written 'hh' (though this letter is little used
nowadays, mostly replaced with 'k'). Since 'x' is not otherwise used in
Esperanto, the "x-convention" is mostly preferred nowadays in situations
where the corrected accented letters cannot be used. -
more

However, since the early 00s, there has been a much better
solution, the Unicode system, which is designed to allow representation of
nearly all the languages/scripts of the world in computer systems. Since
the mid-00s most of the Internet has been based on Unicode, as have most
computer operating systems. I would suggest that you start using it for
cuke.com, especially as you are often working with non-English material
(i.e. at least bits of Japanese here and there -- which generally work out
okay, but you might as well catch up with the world anyway). I don't know
exactly how to do this, not having done any Web creation work myself, but
what you want is "charset=UTF-8" rather than ISO-8859-1. more on
Unicode and
UTF-8

I don't know which version of Windows you're using (or
which version of Windows was first fully Unicode-compliant), but I'm
guessing that the ĝ's appeared as something else, possibly g^, in the
"Esperanto" text in the email the guy sent you, as your email client is
very likely Unicode-savvy. If it isn't, then the Esperanto accented
letters in this email won't appear correctly either.

Anyway, here is a somewhat better translation. It may
still contain a few grammatical errors, and probably could be polished up
by a real Esperanto speaker into fluent Esperanto. Translating the actual
book, with all Suzuki's subtle use and "misuse" of English, would be a
real challenge.

In this Esperanto text, the sixth word, antau(e, should
contain a letter 'u' with a little cup over it. This letter appears twice
more, along with both a 'c' and a 'g' with circumflex accents. If these
letters don't appear correctly, your email client is not Unicode-savvy,
and I'll have to send you this text some other way. Let me know. If you
want to bother.

This one was harder, with slightly complicated conditional
and passive constructions. I'm sure it could be improved by a real
Esperanto speaker. Anyway, here it is.

Dogen-zenji said, "Shoshaku jushaku.'' Shaku generally
means "mistake" or "wrong." Shoshaku jushaku means "to succeed wrong with
wrong," or one continuous mistake. According to Dogen, one continuous
mistake can also be Zen. A Zen master's life could be said to be so many
years of shoshaku jushaku. This means so many years of one single-minded
effort.

Here're "x-convention" versions of the two Esperanto
passages I sent you, without diacritics (the u( just loses the little
breve accent):

Again, these are not really fluent Esperanto, though an
Esperanto speaker could read them and get pretty close to the original, I
think. Would be interesting to see how a fluent Esperantisto would
translate these passages back into English, if he weren't familiar with
the book.